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Faith in Private Schools
Yesterday, I posted “Faith in Literacy” which made the point that Ontario’s Catholic school boards had a much higher percentage of successful students on the province’s grade 10 literacy test than the public boards. Just for fun, I calculated the average percentage of successful students in the province’s private schools, by simply averaging the percentages of each school’s statistics. I made the point that the poor results of a minority of schools masked the superior results of the majority of private schools - resulting in an average that was slightly below the provincial average. Our resident socialist jumped on this, vowing to tell the world that Ontario’s public schools are getting better results than Ontario’s private schools.
As someone who had plodded through the results of all of the province’s private secondary schools, I can assure you that this is not the case. Grumbling, I laboriously went through the results again, this time basing the average on the number of students in each school - and came up with a 79% pass rate, somewhat higher than the provincial average but not as high as the Catholic boards’ average. This percentage too is misleading, however.
The trouble is that there appear to be about three dozen schools, some of them quite large, that get poor results because they enroll mostly students whose second language is not English or French, and these students don’t speak English well enough to pass the literacy test yet. This is not to say that all of the other private schools are getting excellent results - not at all. But the majority of them are preparing between 90% and 100% of their students well enough to enable them to pass the grade 10 literacy test. Overall, the province’s private schools appear to be doing a somewhat better job than the public and separate schools - but of course it would be foolish to assume that all of them are.